By Rosa Moraes

What I am going to say now may come as a surprise to non-Brazilians who read me: Brazil is the nation of pizza. Ok, ok, let’s keep calm: I don't mean that we invented the wheel before the wheel was invented, nor that Brazilian pizza is better than any other pizza in the world, not to mention Italian pizza. But what few people know is that pizza is a tradition as present on the Brazilian table as the famous feijoada.

We are the second pizza consumers in the world, behind only the United States. According to Brazil’s United Pizzerias Association (Associação de Pizzarias Unidas do Brasil), we produce approximately 1 million pizzas per day - and São Paulo, where the vast majority of Italian immigrants settled at the beginning of last century, is the state responsible for consuming more than half of that amount, with 572.000 pizzas on a daily basis.

No wonder we have a popular saying - “in Brazil, everything ends up in pizza” -, joking with the fact that around here, whatever happens, nothing changes in the end (which can be a relief if you think about moments of crisis or disagreements between people who love each other, but also a sad reality, when the phrase refers to the climate of impunity that haunts the country).

But let's get back to the gastronomic part of the story, shall we? The pizza recipe in Brazil took different directions from its Italian ancestral (so much so that I've seen many Italians sit at the table of excellent Brazilian pizzerias and exclaim “ma questa non è la vera pizza!”). No offense - and offense non-taken. There are many differences, in fact, starting with the sharing thing: in Italy, pizza is individual; in Brazil, on the other hand, it is a shared meal, which arrives at home or at the table split into eight slices. 

In Italy, the dough is thin and light, with a hollow and crispy edge; in Brazil, however, the predominant version, especially in the numerous “neighborhood pizzerias”, is a little thicker - and who chooses how thick is not the pizzaiolo or the chef, but the customer: “thick, medium or thin dough?”, the waiter asks. 

As for coverage, sky is the limit. On top of the almost obligatory layer of tomato sauce, we go from more established flavors, such as margherita and four cheeses, to some of our own, such as “calabresa acebolada” - an extremely popular sausage, which is also included in the feijoada, that in pizza comes in thin slices and generously covered with toasted onions - or shredded chicken with catupiry (a very typical creamy cheese that is actually a brand, with a capital "C", but ended up becoming a generic first name on Brazilian people’s lips). And everything topped in large quantities, in opposition to the more reduced and precise combinations made in Italy.

At the same time, another trend has emerged in the last decade or so in Brazil: the one of pizzerias that follow the Italian dough matrix, but at the same time bring high quality Brazilian ingredients to the wood oven, creating small gastronomic treasures. A must-taste example for anyone visiting São Paulo is Carlos pizzeria, with restaurants in the effervescent neighborhood of Vila Madalena and the classy neighborhood of Jardins. Made from slowly fermented dough, the individual pizzas are covered with ingredients supplied by local artisans. There is a constant work of curatorship of small producers: from the cheeses and sausages to the roasted organic tomatoes used as base for the sauce, everything is selected with a very careful eye.

It is a beautiful work not only for the end result itself, that would make any matriarch from the “bel paese” proud of their brazilian descendants, but for serving as a vehicle for the best that is produced in Brazil in terms of artisanal ingredients, to which we often don’t have access. A good example of this is Carlos’ Cheeses from Brazil project, created to bring customers and consumers closer to artisanal dairy producers. Every month, they launch a new special pizza with cheese made by small producers from different states, such as Goiás, Paraíba, Pará, Santa Catarina and Paraná - regions so distant and diverse that its artisanal products would hardly reach the gourmet public in São Paulo, if it weren't for Carlos’ initiative.

Over time, defining what Brazilian pizza really is has become a complex task, indeed. In addition to the arrival of the large North American chains, we have cutting-edge authorial works such as Carlos' and a huge variation in the so-called neighborhood pizzerias. For example, if you are in a more peripheral area of ​​any city, where most of the economically and socially vulnerable population in Brazil is concentrated, the options tend to be less sophisticated, perhaps with alternative ingredients, to lower the price. But there are options - and lots of them. As I said, the taste for pizza in Brazil is universal, embracing all social, cultural and ethnic scales. From my point of view, Carlos sums up the best of all this diversity in what I think is the perfect pizza - or at least the perfect Brazilian pizza!

Photographer: Gui Galembeck
Carlos’s Pizza: Margherita “da casa”